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CalcuttaTwo Years in the City

Amit Chaudhuri

Calcutta pages (Demy).indd 3 16/10/2012 16:54

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Union Books

an imprint of Aurum Press Limited

7 Greenland Street London NW1 0ND

union-books.co.uk

Copyright © Amit Chaudhuri 2013

The moral right of Amit Chaudhuri to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in

writing from Union Books.

Excerpts from ‘Questions of Travel’ from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel.

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-90-852617-5

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

2013 2016 2015 2018 2017 2014

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall


1

A Purchase

It was probably three years ago that the poet Utpal Kumar Basu

reported to me a couple of observations he’d overheard in the

nocturnal din of North Calcutta. They both came from the same

source, an old woman whom Utpalda calls, with some irony,

khurima (‘aunt’) and gyana-bhandar (‘treasure trove of wisdom’).

The woman, herself homeless, would cook for the homeless on

a porch near Sealdah Station. The memory is from circa 2003,

and Utpalda is pretty certain that the group of people he saw

that year must have moved on. Utpalda possesses a context for

Khurima’s first observation: a man had once come to the group

of destitute and desultory wage-earners looking for someone

– say, Nipen – with Nipen’s address (probably a landmark

and directions) on a piece of paper. Khurima had responded

dismissively: ‘Thhikana diye ki hobe? Soye kothhai seta bolo.’ That

is: ‘What good is an address? Tell me where he rests his head.’

Utpalda had found the remark ‘illuminating’ (his word): ‘Quite

true,’ he thought. ‘For the homeless, an address has no meaning.

What’s far more important is where they find a place to sleep.’


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Her second remark was probably made in self-defence and

with pride, though Utpalda can’t remember whom it was

directed at: ‘Amra bhikeri hote pari, pagol noi.’ Or: ‘We may be

beggars, but we aren’t mad.’ This may well have been addressed

to a policeman. Utpalda reminded me that, in the conditions in

which people like Khurima found themselves, sanity must be

a prized asset. To be homeless, destitute, and mad meant you

were totally defenceless. As an afterthought, Utpalda recalled

that there was a mad person in the queue of people who came

to her for food. Khurima’s aphorism made me wonder about

this city in which the difference between the beggar and the

madman was near invisible and also immensely wide.

This, then, is the city as it is now: not its only incarnation,

certainly, but one of several. It is always possible to glimpse it

– through a car window at night – or to walk through it; it is

possible to absorb it without being wholly aware of it. For a

long time, I didn’t see this city – so formative, probably, were

the impressions of the Calcutta I’d visited as a child to me.

‘Erai amader nagarik,’ says Utpalda to me gravely, as we

discuss Khurima. ‘Nagarik’ means, at once, city-dweller and

citizen. ‘These are our citizens.’

My parents, after living in Bombay for twenty-seven years,

moved to Calcutta in 1989. During that period – from the early

sixties to the late eighties – people had been steadily departing

Calcutta: middle-class people, of course, but also workers. My

father had arrived into, and left, the city twice. Once, in the

early forties, he’d been a student here at the Scottish Church

College, an institution then favoured by East Bengali migrant

students for its boarding facilities. Another Chaudhuri, Nirad

C, had studied history at the same college, about twenty years

before my father. The fact that my father and the great mem-

oirist shared the same initials sometimes led people to ask him


A Purchase

3

with a disarming innocence, ‘Are you two related?’ or even, ‘Do

you come from the same family?’ Not the same family, but the

same part of the world; subject, eventually, to the same shift

in history: the older Chaudhuri from Kishoreganj, my father

from Sylhet, both bits of Bengal that would go with Partition.

My father claims that the present spelling of his surname was

given to it by a registrar’s clerk in Calcutta University on the

day he enrolled there. This standardisation of the spelling of

that variously spelt surname at the university might have been

a practice at the time, and would explain why the spelling is

common to alumni from two or three succeeding generations.

The story has had the effect of making me feel I don’t know my

father very well; neither does he have a very clear idea of how

he became who he is.

From him, I got a fleeting sense of North Calcutta as it was.

Those anecdotes, related intermittently over decades (he doesn’t

repeat stories, as my mother does), weave into what little I know

of the East Bengali scholar’s Calcutta – of the ‘mess’, the hostel

room, communal meals, cheap restaurants, and ‘cabins’ – from

the writings of Nirad Chaudhuri and Buddhadev Basu. He lived

in the Hardinge Hostel, which, when he pointed it out to me

for the first time (seventeen years ago), was an unremarkable

run-down brick building, surrounded by numbing but entirely

expected traffic on its way to Sealdah. But, already, things had

moved on to such a degree – not just for me and my father, but

for Calcutta itself (which had changed not visibly, but in every

other way) – that I found it difficult to make a connection with

what was just a building. Yet there used to be a romance in my

father’s allusions to the northern and central parts: whether this

was retrospective, or whether he’d brought this romance to the

city when he’d arrived here in 1941, I don’t know. Some of this

romance is difficult to disentangle from remembered sojourns

to eating places, and private, momentous discoveries of food.


Calcutta

4

Most of those eating places and discoveries, once removed from

the forties and that romanticism, are disappointing. In the late

seventies, my father, executing one of his childlike plans that

now and again inflected his very successful professional career,

took my mother and me, in Calcutta on a visit from Bombay, to

the famous Anadi Cabin to taste its kasha mangsho (traditional

dry mutton) and Mughlai paratha, an oily, flattened piece of

bread fortified by egg which always impressed my cousins

and me when we were children for its royal provenance. This

crowded cubbyhole with damp tabletops alienated us; and I

remember the other customers had their eyes averted but were

curious. My mother was uncomfortable, and her bright sari

probably made her very visible; but she tried to be fair-minded

about the kasha mangsho, and judge it on its merits. Actually,

it was not so much the food: the Calcutta of today was already

upon us – the one without space, without a past, and, as in our

case, without a real appetite.

My father left twice – before returning here for what seems

now the final time. In his memory – as in any memory –

national and world-historical events are indistinguishable from

personal detail. The year he joined Scottish Church College,

1941, was also the year the poet he and his friends adored died;

and I already know that he became a part, for a while, of the

great crowd accompanying the body. Although it’s a struggle

for him these days to articulate sentences, he still informs me

indignantly – as I attempt doggedly to ascertain the year – of,

at once, Tagore’s death and the abrasion on his calf that led to

some bleeding, the result of a poke from someone’s umbrella

in that suffocating crowd. It’s a detail I haven’t heard before;

and, for a moment, I’m unsure, as he lifts the bottom of one

pyjama leg, whether he’s speaking of something that happened

yesterday – because he’s now prone to accidents. But it’s the

crowd he’s thinking of as he passionately stutters the words.


A Purchase

5

From the other snatches of stammered speech, I learn that

he withdrew from the city for a year (a third departure, then,

of which I knew nothing) to Sylhet, after the Japanese dropped

a bomb on Hatibagan in North Calcutta. Maybe he thought

they’d blow up the whole place. He came back gingerly the

next year, and began an articleship in incorporated accountancy

– as he’d been advised to, shrewdly, by his best friend and still-

to-be brother-in-law, because salaries in this line were said to be

generous, and prospects generally excellent: because, whatever

the fate of engineering companies and medical research, people

would always need accountants. Unobtrusively, irrevocably, an

important development took place: incorporated accountancy

and chartered accountancy merged into one body. After being

a relatively unemotional witness to the inevitable moment of

Independence, shocked at the nights of post-Partition violence

in the city, but recouping and resolving to travel towards

becoming a chartered accountant, he made his first, official

egress from this metropolis in 1949, sailing to England.

He was there for twelve years. My mother, who knew him

since childhood, and was taken by surprise by his proposal of

marriage before he left, was reconciling herself to his never

returning – when he invited her to join him in London. She flew

in 1955 from Shillong to Calcutta – with her mercurial younger

brother, Dukhu, who was going on a training course for civil

engineers in Germany. Customarily, it’s the bridegroom who

makes the journey from his town or village or neighbourhood

to the bride’s home to marry her; this was an eccentric, but

unavoidable, inversion. My mother’s never been one to

romanticise Calcutta – as I, for instance, have – but her first and

brief impression of the city was one of beauty and clean air –

the latter, if it lasted for more than two or three days that year, is

not something that Calcutta has possessed for several decades.

Perhaps it’s because it was a first encounter, or a transient


Calcutta

6

acquaintanceship, or because she knew it would be her last

vision of India for a long time, that my mother’s memory of

Calcutta in 1955 is like a personal intimation.

My father, at last a full-fledged chartered accountant, with other

professional qualifications like useful appendages, returned,

with my mother, to a job offer in Bombay in 1961. Soon after,

she was pregnant, as an Indian doctor in London had predicted

she would be: ‘Childbearing has a lot to do with happiness

and mental peace.’ Coming back to India, at least in those

days, was a matter of fulfilment, an occasion for optimism –

something we tend not to remember or acknowledge. Dukhu

had returned earlier from Germany, and had a job in Calcutta;

he insisted my mother come to his house to have the child.

The reason for this was a combination of practical need and

common sense and the precedent of tradition, the last anyway

being a consequence of the first two, not to mention economic

hard-headedness. Tradition asks the childbearing woman to

journey temporarily to her father’s house before giving birth.

In this way, the nuisance of birth is wished away and literally

transported to the ‘other’ place. Importantly, the psychological

closeness between mother and pregnant daughter is seen to

be a necessary condition for the birth – a small bending of a

regulation to briefly replace the mother-in-law’s vigilance

with maternal attention; and the general support and care of

her own family is essential to the mother-to-be. My mother

had no in-laws to escape from; my father was an only child,

displaced by Partition; both his parents were dead. So she kept

putting off the journey to Dukhu’s flat on Fern Road, where

their mother lived with him and his new wife. She knew it was

going to be intolerably hot by the end of April. Still, because

there was no family at all in Bombay, she arrived in Fern Road

early that month. By temperament a nervous insomniac, she

found sleeping difficult because of the yowling of street dogs


A Purchase

7

at night and the passage of traffic at the Gol Park roundabout.

My grandmother contributed to her well-being by knocking

firmly on her door at around 6 a.m., just when she’d embarked

on her first slumber, so she (my grandmother) might walk to

the adjoining balcony and receive the city’s sounds and sights.

As a result of decisions taken without conviction, and slightly

regretted in retrospect – all, of course, is transmogrified by a

mother’s eventual joy – I happened to be born in Calcutta in the

middle of May: a difficult time of year to be here.

My father changed jobs. Leaving Bombay, he took up a position

at the head office (which was then in Calcutta) of Britannia

Biscuits. We lived, for a year and a half, between 1964 and 1965,

in a recent suburb, New Alipore. I seem to summon, without

too much effort, a memory of a veranda or porch, and the

courtyard and the main road beyond: it could be, of course,

that I’m imagining I remember these things. Their shapes and

unremarkable colours, and the daylight they inhabit, are pretty

consistent, though. This is the time that my mother is jotting

down, in a book with a white hardback cover, all the relevant

information concerning ‘Your Child’s Name’ and ‘Your Child’s

First Word’. I would see this solemnly inscribed book after

growing up, but I think it is finally lost. I could have grown

up in Calcutta, and had a very different relationship with it,

but I am a Bombay person. By just a few years, I missed the

trauma and the impress of change that would come upon this

city. Britannia, anticipating labour unrest in the wake of radical

left-wing politics, relocated its head office to a more amenable

metropolis. What remained in Calcutta was a husk called the

‘Registered Office’. It was the usual story of the time: this

gradual emptying of the city of commerce; the absolute reign

over it of what it had always harboured – politics. My father, on

the ascendant, left it for the second time.


Calcutta

8

It takes a while to understand that a city has changed, and

that change, like most change, is irrevocable. By the time my

parents moved back to Calcutta from Bombay in 1989, roughly

seven years after my father’s retirement, the city itself had

traversed a great distance from where it was when he’d left it in

1965. Besides clearly being in decline, it had the strange air of

something that’s been a symbol of the zeitgeist for more than

a hundred years, and now embodies nothing but its severance

from what’s shaping the age. It had become a city that was

difficult to connect with in an emotional and intellectual way.

For me, in many ways, it was not the ‘true’ Calcutta.

What was ‘true’? Throughout my childhood, I’d encountered

Calcutta during the summer and winter holidays – as a place

of freedom from school and a realm of childish anarchy. My

uncle’s house – Dukhu’s house, now no longer in Fern Road,

but further south, in petit bourgeois Pratapaditya Road, in a

lane lined with two-storeyed, different-shaped houses – was my

playground. I’ve written about that house and that Calcutta

in so many works of fiction and essays that, when someone

suggested I write a non-fiction book on this city, I put it off

for years, because I felt I had nothing more to say about it.

The Calcutta I’d encountered as a child was one of the great

cities of modernity; it was that peculiar thing, modernity,

that I first came into contact with here (without knowing it),

then became familiar with it, and then was changed by it. By

‘modern’ I don’t mean ‘new’ or ‘developed’, but a self-renewing

way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life. By

‘modern’ I also mean whatever alchemy it is that changes

urban dereliction into something compelling, perhaps even

beautiful. It was that arguable beauty that I first came across

in Calcutta, and may have, without being aware of it, become

addicted to. I ran into it again in New York in 1979, on my first

American trip, after a stifling ten days among the monuments

of Washington and the sweet prettiness of California. Walking


A Purchase

9

in Manhattan, I was reminded, at once, of Calcutta. New

York was in economically troubled times, and still possessed –

even for the short-term adolescent visitor – an air of menace

and fortuitous unpredictability. The addict of that particular

strain of modernity, to whom noise and stink are oxygen, and

odourless order death, can sniff it out quickly in foreign places,

and swiftly connect it to their own history. 1979 was probably

the last year of its reign. New York no longer reminds me of

Calcutta; with globalisation – maybe even before it happened

– the paths of these cities diverged. With Giuliani, New York

famously gentrified its seedy areas; while Calcutta became one

of those strategic, deceptively populated outreaches that the

wave of globalisation has never quite managed to reach.

The ‘modern’ is man-made; but it’s also a way of conferring

life upon things. These things, as a result, enter your world

organically. What I remember from the Calcutta of my child-

hood has that living quality – a neon sign over Chowringhee,

of a teapot tipping into a cup; tangled clumps of hair – wigs – at

the entrance of New Market; the judiciously dark watercolour

covers of my cousins’ Puja annuals. To these man-made objects,

modernity, as it governed Calcutta, gave an inwardness and life.

This extended to elements of architecture, elements I thought

were essentially Bengali – never having seen them anywhere

else – but which must have arrived here as Calcutta grew

through its contact with Europe.

The most ubiquitous of these are the French windows that

are a feature of the older residential and office buildings of

North and South Calcutta; unless the house belongs to North

Indians and Marwaris, in which case the architecture often

echoes the ancient, and even more foreign, haveli style. (I’m

talking of the older Marwari buildings. The new ones can echo

everything from Roman villas to a Disney illustration.) The

French windows are, for some reason, always green. My uncle’s


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10

house had them; if you parted the slats using the spine (in

Bengali, the onomatopoeic word for this lever is kharkhari), the

street would flood in through the crack, without any part of you

seeping out. This was another feature of this city’s modernity:

the importance – for no discernible reason – of looking. The

windows were foreign and yet part of my conception of

Bengaliness – and they possibly conveyed what I felt about

Calcutta intuitively: that, here, home and elsewhere were

enmeshed intimately. Subconsciously, I may have presumed

the windows were part of Calcutta’s colonial history; but, since

they were hardly to be seen in England, this explanation didn’t

hold.

The windows probably came here in the late seventeenth

century. In 2007, I’d been invited to preside over a prize-giving

ceremony in Chandannagar, where, in 1730, the French general

Dupleix had set up his grand colonial headquarters in what was

already then, for almost sixty years, a French colony. Power –

and the struggle for malarial Bengal – was poised tantalisingly

between the French and the British, until it tilted decisively

towards the latter in 1757. However, Chandannagar remained a

curious and remote French outpost until recently – not so much

a quasi-colony, like Pondicherry, but imprinted distinctively

with a Franco-Bengali ethos. The prize-giving, ironically, was

for excellence in the English language. It took place in the lawns

next to Dupleix’s beautiful, sepulchral house.

It takes about three hours of breathing in dust and smoke,

then gazing in resentful wonder at the new Indian autobahns

that are replacing the old alley-like ‘highways’, then turning into

one of those highways and travelling vacantly past small towns

and countryside awash with plastic bags, tarpaulin, fields, and

crushed mineral water bottles, to finally enter this bit of French

history: a beginning on the banks of the Ganges, a hazy but

still-indelible sketch. The promenade, which surprises you as

you enter the town, is still very French, as is the jetty that hangs


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11

like a promontory on the river; the Ganges is pure Bengal, but

the jetty is elsewhere, and one can imagine a young Frenchman

and his fiancée standing on it, absorbed in each other, more

than two hundred years ago, feeling ‘home’ revisiting them,

dizzied and dwarfed, at the same time, by the East.

Not so with the French windows: they are French only

in name; they’ve become indivisible from what Calcutta and

Bengaliness mean.

Do we actually see these windows – through whose slats I

looked out at the world as a child? Can the windows begin to

look back, as if we were on the outside?

They inserted themselves in Calcutta’s consciousness very

subtly. Testament to this are some extraordinary, but rather odd,

paintings. As Calcutta began to grow from clusters of neigh-

bourhoods into the monstrous, unprecedented metropolis it

would become, with teeming settlements and certain luminous

landmarks – high court, hospitals, jailhouses, university – a new

kind of city type began to emerge from every kind of social

class, a little before the advent of the bhadralok – the genteel

Bengali bourgeois – and his suddenly all-encompassing way of

being. (‘Bhadra’ means polite and ‘lok’ is person; this polite per-

son’s culture, books, and way of approaching things would reign

over Bengal from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s.) The

patuas belong to this nineteenth-century churning (when the

British had already been entrenched in the city for a hundred

years): anonymous painters, some of them Muslims, working

on Hindu devotional themes outside the temple of Kalighat,

selling their products to the common-or-garden urban devotee.

Their work is associated with watercolour and with economical

but emphatic outlines, as well as the styles of the metropolis:

Shiva and Parvati and Ganesh looking like contemporaries of

their worshippers, the embarrassingly handsome Lord Kartik

(Parvati’s son) appearing up-to-date and fashionable, in buckled


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12

shoes and a Prince Albert haircut. This is not to mention the

secular scenes depicting Calcutta – of lascivious babus, their

mistresses, and their domineering wives. None of these pictures

exhibit the obliqueness or psychological realism of bhadralok

modernity: only the vivid footprint of a new, impatient, march-

ing being – the common man.

Although, for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, the work of the anonymous patuas was done in

watercolour, there is an aberration, an experimental foray,

maybe in the early nineteenth century, when their counterparts

in Chinsura town outside Calcutta tried out a new medium: oil.

These paintings are astonishing: they have the resplendence of

oil painting but none of the gloating that oil brought to a great

deal of the European Renaissance – where it coincided with the

new supremacy of perspective, with a manufactured realism,

and the world, henceforth, condemned to becoming a spectacle

in every gradation of colour. These Chinsura oils are like secret

visions of an ancient mythology, brought to light in a moment

of change; most of them are owned by the newspaper magnate

Aveek Sarkar. They are displayed not in his drawing room, which

is populated by other artefacts, but in the dining room – which

means people must access this inner sanctum, and partake of

the ritual of dinner, to view the pictures. During dinner, they

are illuminated by overhead lights; if, turning your attention

from the orchestrated courses and movements through which

dinner unfolds, you glance at them, you’ll see that their subjects

are epic or devotional. There is the mystic Chaitanya, in an

ecstatic, free-floating dance, with his entourage; there, and

there again, is the god Shiva, with his family and a group of

tranquil stragglers – presumably followers. The oils glow and

simmer in, and reflect, the electric lights: you have to squint

to catch all the activity and nuances. Behind these figures, you

may, one day (looking at a reproduction, or if you’re lucky

enough to be invited to dinner a second or third time), notice


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13

the French windows – so unobtrusively have they become a

part of our lives that there is no context in which we might find

them incongruous, or even worthy of comment. The French

windows are attached to colonial-style buildings. Has Mr Sarkar

stopped in his dining room to look at them? I’d been unaware

of them until, almost by chance one day, they inched into my

field of vision; there to stay. Part of the difficulty of noticing

the windows is the relative abstention from perspective in the

paintings, so that they are not so much in the background (they

can’t be, as everything, in a sense, seems to compete equally

for the foreground) as self-contained and iconic: among the

magic points of focus and revelation comprising the scene.

Once you see them, you realise what you’re looking at is the

emergence of a metropolis, with its eccentric visual field –

something that hadn’t existed a few decades earlier. In front

of the slatted windows and those colonial buildings, Shiva –

unsurprisingly louche, but unexpectedly pot-bellied – and at

least some members of his party begin to resemble what they

were probably modelled on: the common people of the day,

the ones who entered, irresistibly, the city’s spaces without

really owning them, and surge into them still. The bhadralok

is nowhere in sight. In fact, now that he’s departed (this time,

surely, forever) after that unique interim of more than one

hundred and fifty years (during which his imaginary universe

was all that was real), Shiva, his family, and his gang seem, once

again, very close. They occupy and visit the public spaces of our

persistent city. They are, as Utpal Basu said of the old woman in

Sealdah, our ‘citizens’.

In mid-2007 I saw that another one of the genteel bourgeois

houses of South Calcutta, this one in a frequently used by-lane

in Ekdalia, had come down. Nothing unusual about that; it’s

been happening for twenty-five years, and, these days, this

destruction is almost a daily occurrence. In fact, though I must


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14

have passed this particular house a hundred times, I hadn’t really

noticed it until now, when it was already demolished – that,

too, wasn’t wholly surprising. What caught my attention, as

the car went past, were the French windows that, loosed from

their original locations, had been stacked vertically against each

other on one side. They’d been left facing the pavement; I got

out of the car to look, never having seen the windows like this,

out of context, before.

That night, I had a brainwave – that I would buy one of the

windows. What I’d do with it I still had no clear idea. Was it part

of some incipient project I’d been half-heartedly entertaining

for the past two years – another flabbergasting branching out,

moving from novel-writing to music-making, from music-

making to musical composition, from composing to collecting?

Whatever the reason, I wanted to acquire that window.

When I told my wife the next day, she didn’t throw her hands

up in despair, but nodded in a way that suggested that what

I’d said made perfect sense. That evening, we took a detour –

because Ekdalia is both near her parents’ flat and near Gariahat

Market – and entered the by-lane to see those windows. She

was transfixed by them. We wondered what would happen

if we just lifted one and took it home, except that would be

stealing – besides, it was too big (and dirty, the frame covered

in dirt) for our car. A watchman at the shop opposite and a

boy observed us, but no one could give us anything but vague

advice about whom to contact if we wanted to buy a window.

A few days later, half-expecting them to have gone, I convinced

myself and my wife to visit the lane again – but during the day –

to make one last effort. The windows were there; this time my

wife, more curious and more of an explorer than I am, slipped

into the site, lost to her own speculations, and called me after

a few minutes. ‘Look at that,’ she said – a door from the same

house was leaning against a wall. It was painted a green – the

generic colour of the French windows in Calcutta – which


A Purchase

15

was still bright in patches, though much of it had peeled off in

scabs. What was striking – at least to us – about the door, which

comprised two doors contained within a doorway, were the

rectangles on the upper halves, which themselves framed two

nubile lotus-shaped iron grilles. These would have been inner

doors then, but not the main one (given their slightly decorative

and pervious quality)? It was difficult to be certain.

The family – like the house – had vanished. Everything pointed

towards them being Bengali: the location of the house; the kind

of house it was; their inability, or desire, to hold on to it. Possibly

West Bengali – that is, people from these parts; it was unlikely (but

not impossible) that a displaced East Bengali family could, after

Partition, have afforded property in this area. The house might

well have come up before Partition, of course; its remnants, the

door, especially, reeked of bygone bhadralok respectability.

It was proving difficult to contact them now. Neither the

watchman at the shop nor the boy nor any of those who hung

out on the pavement had any idea how to, nor saw it necessary

to have any idea. Someone on the site finally gave me a mobile

number and a name – not a Bengali name – and told me to call

this man if I wanted a window. He was neither the builder nor

the contractor, but had something to do with the construction

of the new building.

At least two kinds of migration have shaped Calcutta in the last

thirty years. The first has to do with the flight outward of the

middle and upper middle classes, which began close on the heels

of the flight outward of capital – leading, eventually, to the sale

of houses like the one in question. You can wager that the story

behind the sale is simple and typical. The younger generation is

elsewhere: New Delhi, or even New Jersey. The ageing parents

(or parent) live in the house, which they may or may not have

built, but where the children were born. Upkeep is difficult.


Calcutta

16

One day, their secret wish comes true – a ‘promoter’ makes an

offer: a large sum of money, and two flats in the building that

will come up where the house was.

The second type of migration has been taking place within

the city itself, feeding the property boom of the last decade,

in that false dawn of investment in the state. Although people

woke up from that dawn in 2009 to find things reverting to a

stubborn, paradoxical, politics-induced changelessness, that

migration – and, to an extent, the incongruous boom – contin-

ues. It involves Marwaris who’ve been moderately successful as

traders and who’ve lived traditionally in the North, moving to

the more desirable South, where the boxwallah, or corporate

employee, once lived – not to mention the bhadralok, and, long

ago, in places like Alipore, the old colonial rulers, and, even

today, the great Marwari industrialist families (Birla, Goenka,

Jalan, Khaitan), who are to be found behind immense gates, in

serenely ensconced estates. The other principal candidates for

buying up flats and condominiums in the new buildings are the

dreaded NRIs, who are of the city and yet not of it, who are

Bengali despite being something else. These are people who left

thirty years ago for Michigan, New Jersey, or Atlanta – the ugly

acronym stands for Non-Resident Indian, and encompasses

movement, desire, pride, memory, and, plausibly, disappoint-

ment. The NRIs are not necessarily coming back; against their

better judgement though, they do want to keep one foot plant-

ed in the city in which they grew up.

The two- or three-storeyed bhadralok houses of South

Calcutta, with their slatted windows and floors of red stone,

their rooftop terraces, are less valuable than the land they stand

on. In London, the prices of the narrow Victorian houses with

their dark facades go up and up because the affluent want to

move into them. In Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin, inaccessi-

ble to West Germans until the wall collapsed, the bohemian

and artistic set pushed property prices upward because they


A Purchase

17

wanted to occupy those mysterious, socialist, pre-fabricated

apartments. People in South Calcutta shake their heads when

an old house comes down – but are also plotting, of course, to

move to a better city. When I was last in Berlin three years ago,

the memorialisation of the past was relentless, but the attempt,

by Berliners, to embrace and re-inhabit the city’s troubled post-

War history was striking too. Calcutta has still not recovered

from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.

‘Kaun baat kar raha hai?’ Who’s this?

Every time I called the number the man on the site had

given me, I got to speak to Ram Singh’s brother or brother-in-

law. Ram Singh was either at the site or having lunch. Two days

later, he answered the phone himself.

‘Hello – haan – kaun?’

‘Ram Singh?’

‘Haan, Ram Singh’ – a distant concession, coming from one

distracted all day by construction work – now in Ekdalia, where

he was never to be seen; now, as I was told, in Dover Lane – and

unscheduled lunch breaks in the afternoon.

‘Woh jo Ekdalia mei khidki hain, main ek kharidne chahta

hoon.’ Those windows in Ekdalia – I’d like to buy one.

There was nothing at the other end except the silence of

prevarication – as he tried to piece together what I was on about.

Then, quite patiently, he repeated, ‘Khidki?’

Yes, one window – and the door.

In a business-like way, he told me (as if he were inured to this

kind of query) that they’d cost me three and a half thousand

rupees; this excluded the price of having them delivered in a

tempo. Although I didn’t know what the market price of used

windows was – my guess was nothing – I thought the offer

reasonable. I immediately asked him to take down my address,

and provided directions.


Calcutta

18

For three days, the door and the window stood parked against

the wall outside our flat, while I worried if they’d outrage the

neighbours. I still hadn’t any notion of what to do with them.

I called Mr Mitter, who has a carpenter’s workshop on Rafi

Ahmed Kidwai Road, and who often gets shelves and fittings

done for us. I asked him if he’d take them away for a while.

Mr Mitter didn’t waste time asking questions; he was gracious

enough to insist he’d take no rent; to a storage space near his

workshop went the window and door.

After a year, Mr Mitter informed me that he was short of

space; and that the door might be destroyed by termites. So

the two objects returned to where they were previously – the

corridor outside the door to our apartment. It was unlikely

I’d find a way of exhibiting them; or, more problematic still,

find a context for that exhibition. The context was a city in

which things were being disinterred and dislodged from their

moorings, and being washed ashore by an invisible tide.

My wife said we must bring them in, hang up the window,

fit the door – but where? The flat was already colonised by

furnishings; each object had its immovable caste and assignation.

Firstly, a door was discovered, behind a cupboard stacked with

vinyl records, which had been doing nothing in years; it was

a connecting door between the drawing room and the guest

room that was never opened – and couldn’t be because of the

cupboard, and the objects on the other side. This door had to be

de-hinged, and the corners of the two doors with their rusting

lotus-shaped grilles planed for them to be fixed to that frame.

That left the French windows: some impulse in me militated

against them serving a window-like role in the flat. After much

scouring, I found a space in the tiny passage between the front

door and the entrance into the sitting room: the wall on the

right was vacant. No matter that it’s always in shadow and

obscured by an inner door: we put the windows there.

As a result of their positioning, neither the doors nor the


A Purchase

19

windows are noticed by visitors. Once their attention is drawn

to them (by me), people are always too polite to make anything

but approving noises. Whatever’s in their mind – obviously,

I can’t really know – it gives me an excuse to study these

purchases again: self-indulgently, maybe, but also, now, with a

sort of recognition.


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